Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and destitute. Psalm 82:3

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“Why Men Leave”…a near miss and an unfortunate title.

I’ve come back to this article time and again because it comes ever so close to making some excellent points. It’s like drinking Gatorade or eating lightly salted popcorn, anything that has enough of a hint of flavor to keep you drinking or eating it as if suddenly it will become sufficiently tasty. Having followed Rev. Peterson since reading his book “Scam” over 10 years ago, I suspect his is an error of omission due to having the wrong focus. What I mean is, he focuses where he means to of course, it just isn’t the focus that would offer him a red pill epiphany. I believe, however, that he would be a naturally red pill type of guy if he was shown a few choice truths.

Alas, this article raises some great points about the proclivities of women in marriage, and the drives and triggers that affect male proactive and reactive behaviors.

Peterson lays out what we know very well:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Census Bureau: 63 percent of all youth suicides; 71 percent of pregnant teenagers; 85 percent of all youth in prisons; 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children; and 71 percent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.

On Peterson’s website he links an article by Robert Rector that offers a great deal of data about the effects on children of being fatherless, the following graphic is taken from that article ( I have a subsequent blog post about the article itself. Here, my focus is on marital dynamics)

Red pill adherents can agree that having a father is crucial, no less so than having a mother (spare the snark about giving birth, this is about rearing)

Peterson asks:

Why do fathers leave their children?

And why is society afraid to address the actual reason why men leave?

Good questions.

According to popular myth, men leave because they’re irresponsible and don’t care about their families. Most fathers don’t want to leave their children. They love their kids and want to be engaged in every aspect of their lives. Men hurt and feel pain when they cannot be with their kids. To suggest otherwise is not only insulting to men, it’s a bold-faced lie.

After calling out the myths he starts to deal with the realities.

According to a 1994 study of 500 women in Redbook Magazine, “only eleven percent of mothers value their husband’s input when it comes to handling problems with their children.”

I would suggest to Rev. Peterson that the women responding to the Redbook survey simply do not value their husbands period. It is not a situation where they do not value his parenting input, it is a situation born of decades of feminism teaching anything he can do she can do better that leaves women beginning a marriage with not only a deficit of respect for the man, but in the case of churchian women, a specific set of metrics by which to measure his success in earning her respect. Not only that she creates a dichotomy where his adoption of character traits that she declares are desirable in a mate and co-parent also creates a mate for whom her attraction wanes to nil. Inevitably both respect and attraction are lost, and she is unhappy. She is angry.

women are angry and men don’t know how to deal with this anger. Everyone can see that “mom” has issues; the father knows it; the kids know it too. The mistake [men] make is reacting to this anger with their own anger and fear. To avoid the inner and outer conflict, a man will leave his wife (or girlfriend) and his children.

No, this is just not the case Jesse. Men generally do not leave of their own volition. Men are asked to leave at best, and forced to leave, often by legal threat, at worst. The source of her anger is her own creation. her creation is a product of an ever swirling cloud or irreconcilable emotions, contradictions, unrealistic expectations, moving goal posts, and enigmas and mysteries wrapped in soft tortillas. (huh?)

Here is where it gets bad.

That’s not to say that men don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility for their weakness.

It isn’t weakness Jesse to leave when papers are served that “insist” you do so, or when the knowledge that one 911 call with some choice exaggerations can have him leaving in the back of a squad car. Women in these unhaaapy circumstances are not the most rational creatures….men leaving and avoiding arrest or worse ARE the rational actors. He goes on to buttress my very point about the social paradigm under which men live, but fails to see it as relevant to why they may decide to dodge the bullet.

The role that women play in fathers leaving the home is never discussed on Oprah or written about in any notable publications. This is because women are viewed as innocent and harmless creatures. On the other hand, feminists have long perpetuated the myth that the straight, traditional American male is a Neanderthal.

He wraps up with an accurate if generic summary of Biblical truth about the ordered family.

There’s an order to life: God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, and woman over children. When this order is broken or violated you have “hell” on earth.

There’s been a deliberate plan to wipe out masculinity in society. When you wipe out the man you wipe out God, because the man represents God on earth. Then there’s no truth – no light – and no hope for the family.

God is the source of love – not the woman.

What did he miss?

Just about everything.

He rightly hints at female behaviors that may create acrimony, but then he insults men as weak for responding to it as they do. he seemingly lacks the perspective of harsh reality that could easily be gained by sitting through a day of family court or by reading anything by Baskerville. But Jesse is not the milquetoast white knight, to be sure. In fact it is very surprising that he backs off his central point by laying the “man up” lecture on men rather than focusing on the only aspect of the divorce and fatherless child epidemic yet to be acted upon….the behavior and choices of women.

Listening to his radio broadcast yesterday as he challenged a woman for, as he put it, trying to bring more emotion and less logic to men, I realized he has the potential to be a powerful advocate to men’s causes. he is not constrained by white guilt, but more importantly he is also no constrained by male guilt. Male guilt is usually the downfall of well intended preachers when they wade into gender relationship dysfunction.

5 thoughts on ““Why Men Leave”…a near miss and an unfortunate title.”

1. They do not. They are kicked out. With the collusion of the courts and police.
2. They are not valued, and not wanted. So they make themselves invisible.
3. They are shunned at church because they were kicked out and the church supports the women having custody of the kids.

Now, in the cases where the man fights — he is seen as simply evil. It does not matter if he chooses not do date, and the children are doing better in his care. He has broken the rules of churchianity because he is not being nice. Nice is, of course, ineffective and wimpy.

We have never been called to be nice. We have been called to be righteous. And our example flogged the banksters out of the temple.

I’m really glad you brought this up. The problem with ‘man up’ is that it’s a recipe or a blueprint for a problem. It’s presented as a solution when in fact it has nothing to do with the problem at all.

How do you ‘man up’ when the woman suddenly tells you that the relationship is over, that she never wants to see you again, and does her best to prevent you seeing the kids? How do you ‘man up’ when if you attempt to even be calm and collected it is misinterpreted as threatening? Was Jesus persecuted because he wasn’t strong? Hardly. Manning up won’t stop persecution, and won’t stop people from mistreating us. Typically this places zero responsibility on women at all for any of their actions–it implies that if men only manned up that they won’t behave this way.

I’m late to the party on this one Emapth, but I think you need to keep something in mind when reading JLP. The first is that he has devoted the lion’s share of his energy and ministry to holding blacks to account for the state of our communities and families.

The second is that black men are far more likely to vote with their feet when they are unhappy in a relationship. I’m not making a judgment about this either way because every relationship has its own narrative, but this is generally true, and I’m not blaming black men for it. Black women can be a horror to live with being so “strong, independent, and not needing a man”, LOL.

Factor in that 70% of the children being left aren’t born into intact homes to begin with, and Peterson’s article and it’s title begins to make much more sense.

I realize all that, I have been familiar….a fan….whatever…of him for years after reading his first book 10 plus years ago, and I have donated to BOND for a period of time. My view on that article is actually compatible with what you say here in most ways.
I wish his radio show was here in Memphis.